Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency

“Lifelong punk fan” Fitzgerald debuts with a granular if unpersuasive argument that punk bands offered valuable insight into Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the “conservative, conformist” culture it reinforced. Among other examples of contemporaneous punk songs that countered perceptions of Reagan as a visionary who would revitalize the economy and restore American patriotism, Fitzgerald cites No Direction’s “Reagonomics,” which depicted a nation marred by factory closings and unemployment, and the Ramones’ “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” which critiqued the president’s controversial 1985 visit to a German cemetery where Nazi soldiers were buried. Punk bands also took aim at Reagan’s homophobia amid the AIDS epidemic and his alliance with the Christian right, who, many feared, were using their new political power to “remake the nation.” While Fitzgerald documents the volume of anti-Reagan music, he fails to convincingly frame it as a “rich source of cultural criticism.” Many of the tracks under discussion fail to offer novel perspectives on Reagan, and the analysis quickly becomes repetitive, including in a section on the many songs about John Hinckley Jr.’s 1981 assassination attempt on the president, one of which has no decipherable “lyrical content on the recording, but rather a few screams and some inaudible blabbering after a quick ‘Mr. President’ attention-getter starts things off.” This is likely to fall on deaf ears. (May)